Small Business Fans

5 Simple Ways to Prepare Your New Webstie for Higher SEO Rankings

The first goal for your new website is to be found. That’s what SEO can do. SEO, which is short for search engine optimization, is the process of improving the visibility of a website in the search engine’s un-paid search results such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The traffic your website can gain from SEO can be compared to having a store in the most crowded street in town.

SEO is a complex process and requires skills and knowledge of the various search engine algorithms. Also SEO requires constant maintenance to achieve the desired traffic and ranking goals. A good SEO process could start showing results within three to six months at minimum. So if you are just starting your new website it is best to have SEO considerations from the beginning.

Most of the SEO work on your website will require a professional, but there are several easy things you can do to have your website prepared:

Use The Important Keywords in the Content:The core of SEO is knowing and using the keywords and key-phrases that relates to your business. At first you should research and list these keywords. For example for a dental practice, some of the keywords could be “dental practice, dental emergency, dentist, crowns, dental implants,etc..”. Then you should make sure that these keywords are included in the website content. If your business is local you should also consider including city name, and areas you serve in your keywords list.

Create Effective Title Tags:Title tags, <title>Page Title</title> are one of the most important SEO elements in your website. The best practice is to have a different title for each page to reflect the page content. In addition, make sure to use the most important keywords in your page titles. For example for an office furniture store, it is key to have the name of the business in the title, but you also should include the words Office Furniture. Including the location or name of city is also helpful for local businesses.

Structure Your On-Page Content:Search engines will follow your website structure to determine what keywords are relevant to your website and what you should be ranked for. A good SEO practice is to utilize certain HTML tags for important website content:

Use <H> tag for important titles and subtitles inside your page.

Use <b> for keywords, services, products, locations.

Use <a> on text that is very relevant and can be linked to another area of your website that has more details.

Contain the Important Keywords in Your URLs:If your website domain is http://www.yourwebsite.com then make the link for each page look something like this http://www.yourwebsite.com/keyword-here. The keyword in your link should reflect what the page is about such as, name of product, service, or benefit. Many CMS systems can do this out of the box, I find WordPress to be very easy to use and have many features to customize your website URLs.

Utilize Social Sharing Buttons On Your SiteSpreading the word is one way to get high SEO ranking for your website, and what a better way to do it than adding Facebook, Twitter, and other social media buttons to your website. The more people tweet, share, like, recommend, your website content the more inbound traffic you get.